


Rabbits

by Elsane



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-09-07
Updated: 2007-09-07
Packaged: 2017-10-03 15:57:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsane/pseuds/Elsane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remus comes home after a hard day and almost talks about gardens.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rabbits

For a moment Remus leaned against the doorframe and let himself just look at Sirius.

Sirius sat sideways on the low brick wall that ran around their patio, one leg dangling, the other drawn up to his chest. The evening air was summer-thick but not oppressive, a slow breeze shifting now and then, cool against Remus' bare chest. Sirius was gazing out and away, across the tiny vegetable garden the upstairs tenant maintained, his shirt drawn tight over the planes of his shoulder blades, the knobby curve of his spine.

Remus had walked straight through the flat, pausing just long enough to shed his own shirt, stinking and stained from the day's exertion, and to notice the newspapers strewn over the table. "Try starting with your own fucking Ministry," Sirius had written in precise and vicious capitals across Bagnold's offended photograph, and more cryptically, over the gardening column, "snakes".

The afternoon edition lay on top, still folded.

Remus looked at Sirius, brooding and elegant between the terracotta remains of their own flirtation with gardening, and felt limp with gratitude.

"Sorry I'm late," he said. He detached himself from the doorway and came out to sit next to Sirius. Their watering can, gone feral, rustled nervously behind the flowerpots as he passed.

"Look," Sirius said, without moving.

Remus leaned against Sirius' shoulder, pressing his cheek to Sirius' thin T-shirt. He felt slow and sore, and his sweat stang in the scrapes across his shoulder. He wanted to close his eyes and never move, nestled into warm brick and warm Sirius, breathing in the smell of Sirius' neck. "What am I looking at?" he murmured.

"Just at the base of the fence," Sirius said. He reached up and threaded his fingers into Remus' hair. "Do you see it?"

"It's getting dark." Beyond the garden the blackberry canes spread in a shadowy tangle against the weathered slats of the fence, flowers ghostly in the twilight. There was a flash of motion in the grass then, a quick bright flicker of tail, and he said, "Oh -- the rabbit?"

"She has a nest there. Under the bushes."

"Mmm," Remus said, closing his eyes. Sirius' fingers were slow and gentle in his hair, and he wanted to dissolve into the touch. "Geoff won't be happy. They'll do terrible things to his lettuces."

"I don't care." Sirius' voice was flat.

Remus had to sit up to look at him then, forfeiting the hand in his hair. Sirius stared stonily at the fence, his jaw hard. He hadn't moved, except to touch Remus' hair, and his shoulders were far too tense.

Sirius went on, expressionless, "They're tiny and -- and I don't care. There's six of them."

Remus reached out, shifting so that he could pull Sirius back against his chest, and Sirius was stiff in his arms for a moment, resisting, before he breathed out, long and slow, and melted. Remus wrapped his arms tightly around Sirius, forearm to forearm, palm to belly, holding him whole and here and his.

"You great sap," he said into Sirius' neck.

Sirius slid a hand up to Remus' shoulder, hello transmuting into something deeper, warmer. "Oh," he said, his voice coming alive, and he twisted in Remus' arms. "_You're_ not wearing -- fucking hell, what happened to your ribs?" He pulled away, his face stormy.

"My ribs?" Remus repeated blankly, and looked down. There was a bruise the size of his palm spreading at the base of his ribcage. He prodded it carefully, then harder. It was strangely painless. "I don't know. I didn't notice."

"And your shoulder." Sirius' fingertips skittered over the scrapes. "Fuck, Moony, you said you had paperwork!"

He had sent the owl after he'd fallen into his chair, dumping his heap of wreckage onto his desk, and realized with dull horror that every spell-scorched chip of brick, every scavenged strand of hair, even the bulbs torn up from Elizabeth Bones' garden, had to be inventoried in triplicate, cross-referenced, filed with the MLE, forwarded to the SFD, written up on marginally applicable forms for an eternal multiplicity of secretaries, to be filed and stamped and sorted and never thought about again.

Late, he'd written. Paperwork. Sorry.

It was the crowning indignity: die heroically, and we will immortalize you with interoffice memos.

"Moody had us up at the Bones'," he said. "First."

Sirius glanced up at that, eyes bleak, and Remus begged him silently not to ask about it, not to mention the newspaper article, not to make him talk. But Sirius only looked back down at his shoulder and said, "Why didn't you get these healed?"

"It's just a scrape. It wasn't important." He'd healed his hands. He'd needed to hold a quill.

"You idiot. _Episkey_."

He hadn't noticed the angry heat until it was gone. He reached up, unconsciously, to touch the new skin.

Sirius caught his hand, brought it down to rest between them, and Remus held hard to the solidity of Sirius' hand, to the strangeness of bone and skin and tendon, animate, impelled. He was gripping too tightly, and knew it, but Sirius only tightened his own grasp and held on. An automobile horn blared in the distance, a sharp squeal of brakes; the faint chatter of Geoff's television drifted down from an open window. Remus looked down at their fingers, his own blunt, functional, Sirius' slender and pale, clasped on the rough brick, fading in the dusk.

"Elizabeth bred irises," he said helplessly.

Sirius jerked their hands in answer, once, twice, like tapping on a door. His head was bowed. He was grave and too beautiful, like marble, and despite the painful twist of Sirius's fingers against Remus's own, despite the faint and soothing smell of his sweat, Remus felt very far away.

Very low, Sirius said, "I don't know if we can win this."

"It's Voldemort's deadly two-pronged assault strategy," Remus said. "Dark Arts and paperwork. Death by a thousand papercuts."

"That's not funny," Sirius said, and laughed, like hiccupping. "Moony. It's not fucking funny."

Remus said nothing. He bent forward and dropped his head against Sirius' collarbone. After a moment, Sirius' arms snaked around his waist, pulled him in. The heat of Sirius' skin made the evening air colder. Remus turned his head, heard Sirius' heart, slow and steady, felt his breath, uneven. Sirius' lips moved in his hair.

The rabbit had worked its way across to the garden now, hopping blithely through the twig-and-twine border, and nibbled, delicately, at the furthest lettuce in the straggling and erratic row.

"Oh God, Pads," he said, and after everything, after Bones and bites and iris bulbs, he could be defeated by baby rabbits. "The Standishes have a cat."

"It won't get them," Sirius said. Remus heard the savagery in his voice and knew that Sirius was smiling. "I put up shield charms not even a cat can get through."

Remus had a sharp vision of Sirius crawling around beneath the blackberry brambles, wand in hand, eyes steely with defiance, while thorns snagged in his inadequate T-shirt, tangled in his hair; saw him in the blazing focus of his best magic, tracing elaborate and inspired protection charms around rabbit's nests because elsewhere, in other gardens, they could not keep people from dying.

It must have taken him hours.

"We should hire you out to people with allergies," Remus said, and he was laughing, frantically, and wished he could stop. Sirius slid a hand up to the back of his head and held him, silently, until he stilled.

The watering can plinked softly to itself in the corner where it had built a nest out of the ruins of their aspidistra. Remus breathed in, out, carefully, listened to the placid sound of water dripping, and deliberately did not think of blood, or irises.

He said, "We're late for dinner." His voice floated, calm.

"Lily will kill us," Sirius agreed.

Neither of them moved. They leant into each other and watched the rabbit make its unhurried way along the lettuces, ears flicking, wild, wary, and unafraid as the shadows gathered in.

Stars came out in the darkening sky one by one.


End file.
